A CHRISTMAS STORY

"REAL LIFE IN THE FAST LANE"

     Every day that I can do it, the family Volkswagen Bus rolls out of the garage and two of our four kids jump in for a ride from our Queens, New York home to Amsterdam Avenue on the west side of Manhattan where they attend school.

Ralph and Emily on their way to school.

     The children are seventeen and fourteen, a boy and girl. Both are students at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music and Art and Performing Arts. In fact, our other two children, aged 24 and 21 graduated from the same school.
     Once they made a movie about the school called “Fame.” The title song in that film has a line in it that says:
     “I’m Gonna Live Forever.”
     At times, I think the line should be changed to “I’m Gonna Live At Home Forever.”
     In any event, my wife and I are dancing as fast as we can.
     But it’s for the youngsters, that sometimes, two, even three times a week we ride around inside a vehicle once described as a ‘big, comfortable living room on wheels’ with a tiny engine, about the size of four Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes.
     The ride is the thing.
     Most people dread traffic.
     This year—2002, I have discovered, that often the morning news is much worse than traffic.
     Call it, “new normal” post 9/11 for a lifetime New Yorker.
     Since family is the real refuge in life, I have tried in 2002 to spend as much time as I can in the embrace of sibling rivalries, better marks in math, and watching my 24-year old on Comedy Central in some movie called “Porn & Chicken,” that I totally do not understand.
     I have also tried to understand my oldest daughter, who is an immaculate writer listed as one of the best young writers in America, and also her boyfriend, who is making movies in college.
     Our ride to school begins in Hollis, usually about 07:15 a.m.
     The highway is always crowded.
     Cars are entering New York City, on the road called the Grand Central Parkway (GCP) from Long Island.
     Long Island sticks out from the mainland for about 100 miles, but most of the people coming into New York City are from Nassau County, not from Suffolk County, which continues where Nassau stops, to the end of Long Island.
     Drivers, even at this early part of the day are already riding bumper to bumper because the road narrows in Queens and the speed limit dips to where just a short way down the road, the Kew Gardens Interchange forms one very bad bottleneck.
     The kids, by the way, long before we get as far down the road as Kew Gardens are snuggled up under airline blankets and snoring while some Mozart echoes softly around inside the bus.
     As we move along at a brisk clip, the Long Island Expressway (LIE), once aptly described as “the world’s longest parking lot” for its monumental traffic jams melts past our windows (The VW Bus features 12 separate windows).
     Just beyond the LIE we slip through a corridor formed by the GCP, that features on both sides, what is left of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fair, including the “theme” of the 1964 expo.—a stainless steel globe of the world called The Unisphere.
     Most folks know the Unisphere as the Continental Airlines logo. CO, created an abstract image of the sculpture that was done originally for the Fair by U.S. Steel.
     Today, every time I see a CO aircraft with its ‘globe’ tail, I think of the Unisphere.
     The CO logo sits since 1964 behind the NYC Building, while a rather large Lufthansa billboard just down the road proclaims:
     “A Dozen Times A Day To Germany—And That’s No LIE,” entreating a million mad road warriors a day to get off that road and fly away to Deutschland.
     Everybody loves New York, we think.
     We pass Shea Stadium, home of the NY Mets baseball team and chug onward to Bowery Bay where LaGuardia Airport is located.
     LaGuardia sort of extends itself out to the GCP. In fact, when an aircraft is arriving on final over the road, you notice that the lamp posts are shorter in case (god forbid) the aircraft comes in too low.
     Sometimes, when a B757 passes over your car, low and fast, you think you could almost touch the aircraft swooping over the road and fence, touching down lightly upon the runway.

Tim Peirce (left) and Robert J. Aaronson. Tim, who died in January 2000, managed LaGuardia for 22 years. Mr. Aaronson, who served as Port Authority aviation director, today is Director General at Airports Council International in Geneva.

     Remember that all of LGA fits quite neatly inside the oval roadway system of the passenger facilities at JFK, six miles down the road on Queens, New York’s south shore.
     The wonder is how does this 600-acre airport stay open, let alone handle 20 million passengers annually?
     People just like LaGuardia.
     First, they liked Tim Peirce, who as manger of the airport for 22 years was an absolute genius at getting a hostile neighborhood to realize that airport fear, was nothing more than another big city trauma.
     Next landmark is the Tri-Borough Bridge. Most New Yorkers know that the Tri-Borough is usually the fastest and best way to get into “the city” (most everybody outside of Manhattan, even residents of the other four boroughs that are part of greater New York City, refer to Manhattan as the city”).
     Built for the 1939 World’s Fair and the opening of LGA Airport that same year, the Tri-Borough Bridge touches Queens, Manhattan and The Bronx, thus the name.
     But once across the span, we jog off onto 125th Street in the heart of Harlem and quickly down to 116th Street.
     We stay away from the FDR Drive, named for President Roosevelt because it is always flooded when it rains, and always slow and busy, even on clear days.
     The FDR is a predictable traffic mess of BMW’s and exotic cars with Connecticut, New Jersey and New York license plates, full of people who don’t know or wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere in Harlem.
     As we move west on 116th Street, the early morning deliveries are just beginning.
     You get a real sense of just how cosmopolitan New York City is. Breakfasts can be Chinese dim sum or Chilean Empanadas of egg and cheese, or bagels and coffee, or even the old standby, McDonalds.
     Along our ride to school New York serves up a feast every day. There simply is no excuse for anybody to complain that there is no choice.
     Of course as the music plays and the kids sleep, we never stop but rather enjoy the scene, planning to return someday when the pace is less frenetic.
     After a quick left turn onto Fifth Avenue at 116th and then a quick right onto Central Park North, (111th St.), the best part of the trip unfolds like a magic carpet under our wheels and all around us.
     Now we are in Central Park.
     There is no greater place on earth than Central Park. It’s a miracle that keeps amazing, every time you are there.
     The park is hilly up north and the roadway that is only a couple blocks or so from Central Park West twists and rolls through dense tree-lined areas that completely obliterate any view of the mighty city surrounding.
     There are joggers and people out for horseback rides, and stands of pine trees and black birch abound.
     An early December snowfall made the park feel like Vermont. People were out on crosscountry skis, while off in the distance horns were honking beneath a steel gray sky.
     When you are in Central Park, you feel the pressure release instantly. What a wonderful interlude our ride through this magic place always is.
     We exit at 67th Street West, past Tavern on The Green where all the trees have those little white lights twinkling all the time.
     But just across CPW on 67th, is the greatest restaurant in New York and the only place that you should ever make certain that you visit no matter what, at least once in this lifetime.
     The place is called Cafe Des Artistes. What makes this place so great? Is it the playful nudes made up as wallpaper adorning the walls of the restaurant? Is it the food, or all the rich and famous people who frequent the establishment? Is it the price or the tough reservation at the Cafe?
     All of the above, we think.
     But don’t miss it.
     We have not been able to afford to eat there in a couple of years, but the memory of our last visit makes just being on the same street a pleasant ride.
     A quick left off 67th street and down Columbus Ave., past Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and around to Amsterdam, which is behind Lincoln Center and we are at LaGuardia High School.
     The kids mumble their thanks, just as long as we stop where the other kids arriving by subway cannot see that ‘Daddy’ drove them to school. We have moved through one of the busiest rush hours of any city in the world in just under 40 minutes, arriving usually at about 07:50 a.m.

"Sorry, Rudolph. Looks like air cargo delivers again."

     After good-byes it’s up town on Manhattan’s west side to 81st Street and Broadway, for a takeaway coffee and croissant at Zabar’s.
     Zabar’s is the greatest deli/appetizing gourmet store in New York.
     The retail part of the place is legendary with prepared foods, cheeses and breads, that are beyond compare anywhere else.
     In fact, the entire idea of top line specialty foods, prepared foods and the rest was a fixture at Zabar’s before anywhere else.
     A left turn from 86th Street (at 96th Street a cop will give you a $70.00 ticket) and the bus moves down to the Hudson River and the West Side Drive.
     Some days it’s a drive a bit inland, north past the tomb of General Grant, while other days it’s right down to the drive which moves along the river offering a clear view across to New Jersey and ahead to the George Washington Bridge (GWB), the most beautiful steel arc across any New York waterway.
     We always look closely, approaching the GWB, straining to see the little red light house that once served mariners on the busy Hudson River, before the bridge was built.
     There is a wonderful children’s story title “The Little Red Lighthouse Under The Great Gray Bridge,” that every child should read.
     We are moving toward the Cross Bronx Expressway (CBE) now, leaving Manhattan’s west side, with one quick, last glance at the Palisades of New Jersey, which just beyond the GWB looks much as they did over 400 years ago, when Henry Hudson, first sailed down the river, that today bears his name.
     Across the northern part of New York City on the CBE, the trusty VW Bus moves until we reach the southern most part of the Hutchison River Parkway where we head south crossing the Bronx Whitestone Bridge which connects via the Whitestone Expressway to Astoria Blvd. leading to our parking spot near Air Cargo News offices at the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport.
     Our early mornings are free of other worldly matters, free of much attention to anything more than family, the familiar and the comforting.
     Cost is seven bucks for tolls, about five for gas and unspecified amounts for Zabar’s.
     Our journey lasts for only about an hour. But what an hour of power, that is always there for us and cannot ever be taken away.
     From our family to yours—
     Merry Christmas and the best of the best in 2003.

Geoffrey Arend